The President had been reading over the bursar's notes on undergraduate rent agreements when Amanda had called. She had managed, it transpired, to persuade Rafferty that his presence was not required by the President just now, and that she had to see him on private business of some urgency. Rafferty, being the perfect gentleman, had obviously understood and allowed the girl to make her own way. Amanda was quite aware that it had been all too easy, and knew Rafferty could hardly be expected not to have suspicions.

The President poured wine, and his glass was more than half-full before he looked up and, with a broad smile on his bewhiskered face, said: 'Ah, but you won't have one, will you, my dear?'

Amanda leaned back in the green leather chair. 'Alcohol,' she admitted languidly, 'has a corrosive effect on the interstitial nuclei of my anterior hypothalamus.'

'Indeed,' said the President, 'and we can't have that.'

'Absolutely not,' said Amanda.

The President cast a reflective look at the blood-red depths of the wine before taking an appreciative sip. Now, I want you to tell me, my dear '

'Yes?'

'Where have you left my TARDIS?'

Terrin had seen enough.

The captain took one last look around the centre, shaking his head ruefully at the hollow skeletons. If I could understand only a part of this, If I could understand only a part of this, he thought sadly. he thought sadly.

He was not really clear why he had come back, except that he often needed time alone to think without his officers around him. They were a good crew, he knew that, but the responsibility sometimes weighed on him to the extent that he felt he was only using his brain and not his intellect. Terrin needed clarity and silence. And he was finding it here, in this deep-space graveyard.

Quallem would take care of things, he was confident of that. She was inclined to be a little over-enthusiastic at times, he thought, but she was basically a reliable officer. It sometimes occurred to him, usually in the greyness between waking and sleeping, that the ship might be more tightly run under Quallem that her bursts of anger and vitriol were a reaction against the laxity of the regime and the creaking, barely spaceworthy ship. A substitute for real authority. Terrin did not like to dwell on the idea.

He had known the young Listrelle in his second phase at the Academy, when she was a cadet and he was a lieutenant on a user-awareness course, studying the longterm effects of linkage with neural networks. Her hair had been a glossy bob then, and she had been thinner, almost skin and bone, but her crispness, her almost brutish dedication, had been the same. He wondered how she relaxed, until one day he had seen her in the Intuitive Fencing hall. The mask, designed to render each player totally blind, hid her face, but there was no mistaking the bright red mushroom of hair and the lithe body. Lieutenant Terrin had leaned on the gantry and watched the seventeen-year-old Listrelle whirling and parrying in the perfect union of mind and body, second-guessing her opponent, a young man, on every move. Terrin had tried the game a couple of times but he found the mask claustrophobic, and he had not been especially good at monitoring the dizzying display of heat-readouts and sound-graphs which rushed in front of his eyes at each moment of play. It had seemed to him the sort of game that Quallem would excel at.

Now, a decade later, she had been with him for almost two years the youngest first officer ever assigned to a starship by Lightbase and he still hardly knew her. Joshua Kenley, her predecessor, had been a very different case, a true humanitarian and the captain's personal friend. He could not imagine Quallem having close friends. There was a rumour among the junior officers that she had never had a lover, but Terrin knew this to be untrue. One did not spend a year at the Academy with someone without finding out these things.

The sound, when it came, snapped him back into the present. He whirled around from the skeleton. It was a crackling, like feet on autumn leaves... or was it more the rush of air through the trees themselves? His panic growing, he scanned the room. Nothing came up on the infra-red readout, and yet the sound was building up.

It was behind him now. He primed his grin. It was a Derenna-36, with symbiotic sighting, and missing did not come into its vocabulary. The problem was that, right now, there was nothing to aim at.

He retreated against the wall and flipped open his communicator.

'Terrin to Icarus Icarus. Come in, please.'

The sound seemed to be channelled through his communicator, intensified. There was something something in the room, he could feel it. Beginning to wish he had not backed into a corner, Terrin tried the ship again. The static crackled back at him, still intensifying. in the room, he could feel it. Beginning to wish he had not backed into a corner, Terrin tried the ship again. The static crackled back at him, still intensifying.

He was still frantically trying to call when the air in front of him concealed into a bubble of twinkling red lights. The sound was like a sigh of release from a grave, borne on the wings of a thousand phantom birds. He heard it rushing in his ears as the lights blotted out the room.

The shadows lengthened on the bridge of the Icarus Icarus.

The tension was tangible. The only person to appear relaxed was Strakk, sprawled in a chair next to Ace with his feet up on the spare flight-monitor. Against every rule in the book, he had popped a tranquillizer about half an hour ago. He'd offered one to Ace, but she had learnt very early to say no to such things.

'So are you married, then?' she asked, trying and failing to turn her constrained neck.

He seemed to find this funny. 'No. Where are you from?'

'Perivale. West London.'

Strakk's inane grin widened. 'What, the forest?'

'No. It's... hard to explain.'

The angry bleeping cut into the tension on the bridge. Cheynor was at the TechnOp's side in an instant.

'The captain's life-trace, sir.' The man's face was white as he looked up at the Second Officer. 'It's gone.'

'Energy turbulence increasing,' reported another crew member. 'Location... one-two-seven, four-eight-four from current.'

'Distance, Mr Rost?' Quallem asked.

'One micro-trak.'

Cheynor's eyes met Quallem's across the bridge. 'The captain '

Quallem was in the command chair. 'Mr Larsen, disengage boarding-link and seal all hatchways.'

The TechnOp's fingers stabbed at the relevant controls. 'Disengaging, ma'am.'

Cheynor, fury in his face, swept across the bridge. 'Lieutenant-Commander, that last order is '

'Is precisely that.' Quallem seemed supremely indifferent to anything Cheynor had to say. 'All units, prepare for undocking. Standard escape velocity, Mr Larsen.'

'Engaged, ma'am.'

'Set course for Station P4. Mr Strakk, please take your position.'

Strakk swung his legs down and winked at Ace. 'Playtime,' he whispered. 'See you later.'

Cheynor was visibly shaking with rage. He leant on the arm of the command-chair and kept his voice discreetly low.

'May I remind you, Lieutenant-Commander, that three men are unaccounted for, including the captain '

'They're dead, Mr Cheynor.' Quallem's green eyes were on the monitor screen. 'Their life-traces have gone. What do you want me to do? Risk more lives?'

The whine of the engines, even more tortured than usual, was growing, and the ship juddered as it disengaged from Space Station Q4.

'We have a responsibility to those men.'

'We have a duty to Lightbase.' Quallem's answer came instantly. 'As the acting captain my first priority is to report the situation so that it can be dealt with. You know as well as I do, Mr Cheynor, that we're not in range here.'

'Then send a beacon. Within the hour '

'Within the hour we could all be dead.'

For a few moments, Cheynor remained with his gaze fixed on Quallem's white cheekbones, a mixture of emotions churning inside him. Then he turned and walked slowly from the captain's podium without looking back.

'Got problems, Boadicea?' Ace could not resist it.

Quallem turned, her hair and eyes blazing in the orange light, and strode down from the podium to Ace's chair. She took the girl's chin in a leather-gloved hand and pushed it up so that her head was hard against the back of the chair.

'You are the most impertinent little madam I have ever met,' said Acting Captain Quallem coldly, and let her go.

'Then you should get out more,' Ace called after her.

If anyone had been passing by the Hinchcliffe Building of St Matthew's College, Oxford, and had looked in at the bullet-proof window of the President's study, they would have seen an unusual sight.

The President himself had flipped open his drinks cabinet and was observing a number of small white lights on what looked like some immensely complex video-game. Meanwhile, a slim, dark-haired and frighteningly attractive girl in mirror shades was sprawled in the President's own oak chair, watching him.

Amanda should, of course, have been as incapable of feeling indifference, or other emotions, as any android. She merely awaited orders, and if she had fulfilled her last instructions without receiving any new ones, then the usual practice was to wait patiently, although androids do not feel patience or impatience, until those expected orders arrived.

Amanda, unfortunately, had been working on her personality, and the President rather liked the idea. He was especially keen on the quirk of cybergenetics that had resulted in the girl abandoning the android's apparent air of cool detachment and indifference in favour of a simulated personality whose prime trait was an air of cool detachment and indifference. It was enough to make an android engineer's heart glow with pride.

'According to the interstitial relay,' said the President, a smile on his florid countenance, 'the starship has undocked from the space-station.'

'Now,' said Amanda, 'might be a good time.' There was a click, and the President turned to see her slipping a new cartridge into her pistol.

'Heavens, no, my dear,' said the President hurriedly. 'Put the thing away. You go to Heathrow now and you're likely to blow the whole thing sky-high. Excuse the metaphor.' He shut the drinks cabinet and hurried over to his bookshelf, looking for something among the nineteenth-century novels. 'Tell me,' he said, running his finger along the tomes, 'do you find it odd, having performed an action as the dress-rehearsal for the action itself?'

'The question is irrelevant,' said Amanda. She sounded almost bored.

'Quite so. Quite so. Ah.' The President found the copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray that he had been looking for, and removed a slim cylinder from its spine. He smiled at Amanda. 'Here we go, then,' he said jovially, as if opening the batting for the Senior Common Room First XI, and slipped around behind her. He peeled back her skin to reveal the aperture in her neck, and inserted her new orders. that he had been looking for, and removed a slim cylinder from its spine. He smiled at Amanda. 'Here we go, then,' he said jovially, as if opening the batting for the Senior Common Room First XI, and slipped around behind her. He peeled back her skin to reveal the aperture in her neck, and inserted her new orders.

Tom and Bernice had had no success in finding Rafferty, an idea which had acquired even more urgency since the encounter with the apparition in the Professor's college study.

Now, Bernice was beginning to wonder if she truly was in the twentieth century. When she asked Tom for transport, she thought grimly, this was not what she had expected. The driving rain needled her skin and blew her hair in front of her eyes as she pedalled furiously. The lactic acid was aching in her calves, and Tom, some way ahead on his own bicycle, kept beckoning to her to hurry up. She gritted her teeth and pushed harder on the pedals.

They rode past Wadham and the King's Arms, before emerging from South Parks Road and swinging left. Tom was pedalling hard under the Bridge of Sighs. Bernice spared it an admiring glance but no more, for she was a little unnerved by the screech of brakes and the insults from behind her. I will never complain about shuttle travel again, she thought.

Halfway along New College Lane, they almost ran the Professor down.

He caught Bernice as she toppled from the unwieldy machine.

'Dear me, Miss Summerfield,' he said, 'I shouldn't have left you alone at the mercy of this young reprobate.'

'Professor,' Tom said eagerly, 'we were attacked!' The memory of his earlier fear had dissipated, and he was keen to boast about the experience now.

'It's true,' Bernice added, a little dizzily. 'This dreadful thing thing ' She shook her head, regained her composure. 'Let's start at the beginning.' ' She shook her head, regained her composure. 'Let's start at the beginning.'

'Yes,' said Rafferty, bewildered. 'Let's.'

Something had already told him it was going to be one of those days.

Chapter 9.

Far Out and Gone Ace was bored. One of the crewmen had clipped a pair of wafer-thin headphones over her ears, which she assumed was meant kindly. Ace, though, had heard enough of mid-millennium music to know she didn't like it. Some of it was all right. The closest parallel between twentieth-century music and what was washing through her head now was some of the ambient-dub she had heard on Earth in the late nineties; the Orb or Brian Eno. It was relaxing, in a way, and the sound quality was perfect, but she had still been relieved when the loop ended. She didn't have the heart to ask if they had any Carter USM.

It hadn't surprised Ace that Strakk doubled up on communications. Despite his keenness to point guns at people or maybe because of it she had gleaned the impression that security was not his first love, and that Albion Strakk would prefer something where he was less likely to end up getting greased. He was the one who, after five minutes' cruising in deep space, picked up the message.

'Communication coming through from ' His face was a mask of disbelief as he turned to Quallem. 'From the space-station, Commander.'

'We're not in range, Mr Strakk.'

'No, ma'am. From Q4.'

Listrelle Quallem's expression said, But they're all dead down there. But they're all dead down there. She did not look at the second officer. She did not look at the second officer.

'Visual.' The order came from Cheynor. Ace wondered why. The monitor picture broke up into blue and silver shards. Strakk made some calibrations, and appeared worried. 'We're losing it. Can we isolate?'

The picture began to take shape, and the crackling that went with it took on the vestiges of speech.

Ace was looking at the screen like the rest of them. It pleased her to think that, over the last few years, she had not lost her capacity for astonishment.

'It's him,' she murmured.

The face on the monitor was that of the Doctor.

Cheynor heard Quallem draw breath. 'You know him?'

'That's the fool who was on the station with her her.' The first officer didn't even look at Ace, but a crimson fingernail pointed in the direction of the restrainer chair. 'Is this some kind of joke?'

'Uh, negative, ma'am,' Strakk said, his fingers flickering over the console. 'The computer reports a high-frequency beacon, transmitting on pre-programmed schedule ' He grinned, possibly at Ace. 'It's a recording,' he said. Ace thought she heard him add 'Cool,' under his breath.

'Then get it, someone!' Quallem yelled. 'Get the blasted sound!'

They all heard it now, strained through the interference.

'...grave threat. I repeat, avert your current path and advise Earth of your situation. You must believe me...' A huge wash of static drowned the Doctor for several seconds ' the most serious time-break. We have very little time ourselves...'

Now both the sound and picture were breaking up. The Doctor's image crackled through a snowstorm.

'Why can't we get a clear signal?' Ace asked. As usual, everyone ignored the prisoner.

'Get him back,' Cheynor said. 'We need that message!'